The Transom Review Volume 11/Issue 3 Neenah Ellis June 2011 (Edited by Sydney Lewis) Intro from Jay Allison When we heard that Neenah Ellis was making the move from her long career as a national producer to become a station manager, we asked her to keep some notes to put up on Transom. She's been on the job at WYSO in Ohio now for two years and has just written her manifesto, Seven Good Things About Working at a Small Local Station. Transom lives in the same building as our local radio station and we know the rewards and difficulties of deciding just what "public service" means. Neenah helps with that definition, bringing in elements like variety, serendipity, teamwork. The future of each local public radio station is in that station's hands. Any station that relies primarily on a national feed is wasting resources and is subject to obsolescence. Localness is the only value we bring that can't be created somewhere else. Neenah's transition from national to local is an important one; come read about it. The Transom Review – Vol.8/ Issue 4 About Neenah Ellis Neenah Ellis has been in radio all her life, at her family’s radio station in Indiana, at WAMU and NPR in Washington, as a show producer for MPR, an independent correspondent and now as the general manager of public radio station WYSO in Yellow Springs, Ohio. For NPR she traveled all over the world, with wide-open ears. She is the recipient of an Alfred I. Dupont-Columbia University Award and three Peabodys. Her Morning Edition series about centenarians Neenah Ellis resulted in a best-selling book: “If I Live to be 100,” which as been published in five languages, selling more than 100,000 copies. “The One- Room School in the Twenty-First Century” aired on NPR and PRX. She was an interviewer on a fifteen-year long oral history project at the United State Holocaust Memorial Museum and a founding member of the DC listening group HEAR NOW. She is a long-time member of AIR and remembers going to the first Third Coast International Audio Festival in Chicago. At WYSO she’s guided the small but mighty staff to numerous reporting awards, collaborated with many local non-profits to bring into being an innovative training project called “Community Voices,” helped launch locally-produced programs and modules and took part in the creation of an archive to house WYSO’s significant audio collection. She’s married to Noah Adams and lives in Ohio but considers the public radio community home and feels lucky to have known so many creative and generous people over such a long time. She’s never done anything but work in radio but just started teaching yoga to have something to fall back on in case she lives to be 100. 2 The Transom Review – Vol.8/ Issue 4 Seven Good Things About Working At A Small Local Station If you are considering as a career making radio stories as a producer or reporter, there are three basic paths you can take: work for a network program, be an independent producer and sell your work to others - or work at a station. I’ve done all three and right now I’m pretty high on working at a station. Here’s my frame of reference: I work at WYSO in Yellow Springs, Ohio a town of 3,500 people. We’re 20 miles from Dayton and we have a million people in our coverage area, so we have a large enough listener base to support a full-time staff of nine with four part- timers and more than 20 weekly volunteers. WYSO is licensed to Antioch University. I’ve been the general manager for two years. Neenah Ellis at WYSO My parents owned a small commercial station in Valparaiso, Indiana when I was growing up. I worked in the news department in high school and then studied journalism in Iowa. My first public radio job was at WAMU in DC, and nine months later I became a staff producer at NPR. I stayed there about ten years and then spent the next twenty years as an independent producer selling most of my work to NPR. I married Noah Adams, the host of All Things Considered back then, and we pretty much lived and breathed the business and art of making radio stories for NPR but we both always hoped to get out of DC and go to a small town one day. We landed in Yellow Springs – he’s still working for NPR. So far, so good. These are my seven best reasons why you might want to consider working at a small station, too. One: Connection with the Community. The number one reason, and the most powerful one for me, is the connection with the community. WYSO has deep roots. It started as a student station in 1958 at Antioch College and many of those former students and early listeners are still loyal members. They like the network programs but they insist on local ones, too. They volunteer happily for whatever needs doing. They give feedback – a lot of it. We always know where we stand with them. 3 The Transom Review – Vol.8/ Issue 4 During our fund drives many of them answer phones and in the quiet times, we have great conversations. They talk about their driveway moments and the things that made them so mad they nearly drove off the road. We hear about their kids, their jobs and their wide variety of political opinions. Viet Nam veterans and Peace Corps alums sit side by side. Policemen and retired professors. Business owners and students and Odd Fellows. I hear what they like about the station and what they don’t. Radio is illusory but these conversations make my job tangible and rewarding. During my first week at WYSO a soft-spoken gentleman came to my office and told me that his grandson needed a bone marrow transplant. Could we publicize that? (We had no mechanism in place to get community events publicized. We do now.) A grandmother from the senior center called and wanted us to do an interview about potential cuts in social services. A former WYSO staff member works at a food bank now. She asked me - “Can WYSO please interview someone during the holiday season to get the word out about all the hunger in Dayton?” When I worked at NPR – admittedly before listeners could fire off e-mails – I never felt this connected to listeners. They were somewhere out there but I only met them when I traveled to cover stories. There were great rewards at NPR, but they were not about being closely connected to a community. Two: Variety. Secondly, and I know this is not for everyone, I love the variety of the work at a small station. Some days I edit news stories, on others I pull my hair out working on budgets. During fund drives I’m on the air asking for money and I answer phones, too. I write grants, shovel snow, give studio tours, shake hands at festivals and emcee events. We have no news director or program director so I brainstorm like crazy with staff to plot the direction of our coverage. Everyone at WYSO does many things. Our webmaster, Juliet Fromholt, is also the deputy operations director, so she can program the automation, take feeds from the network and do all those other tasks that require technical expertise – plus she’s a volunteer music host and features live, local bands every week, which she books and engineers and produces for on-line distribution. Until recently she was a reporter, too. At NPR, I did pretty much the same work for ten years, hardly ever straying from my job description. 4 The Transom Review – Vol.8/ Issue 4 Three: Teamwork. That gets me to teamwork. I worked for All Things Considered throughout the 1980s and we were a strong unit, especially in a news crisis. That was one of the best things about working there. -For this spring’s fund drive – in the midst of a terrible local economy and pending cuts from the state and from Congress – we conducted an on-air campaign that surpassed our goal by 50 thousand dollars. -Last December we deployed our news staff, interns and volunteers and spent 12 hours at the local post office to Neenah Ellis in 1981 working as a create a feature program about how the p.o. acts as a production assistant at All Things local hub for stories and history. Considered. -We worked with the local public television station on a reporting project called “Facing the Mortgage Crisis” that leveraged all our resources to create more programming and useful information on a single subject than we ever could have managed on our own. Four: Community Service. If you have a need the urge for community service, you can fulfill it at a public radio station. At WYSO, we have local news, twelve different local music programs, a book program, a public affairs program, a resident poet, a nature commentator, a weekly politics module, a film program and a quiz show. Over the years hundreds of programs have come and gone and we are developing new ones, too. Five: Creative Outlet. Need a creative outlet? This winter we started a free, monthly, radio production-training course. It will meet for five months. Ira Glass is coming in May and the trainees will have a master class with him before we send them into neighborhoods to collect stories.